Nonfiction Book Editing

Writing a book is a tremendous achievement. After you’ve completed your manuscript, you need an editor to help ensure the book is as good as it can be. Even authors who are writing experts need an editor. After working on a book for months or even years, it’s easy to miss things in your book that could be confusing to readers, such as awkward phrases, or even structural problems.

And will AI eliminate the need for an editor? No. There are fantastic tools available now to help find errors, but you will always need another human to read it to uncover structural errors, wrong names or dates, or things AI isn’t smart enough to see.

I work with authors to perform several types of book edits and as described below. If you need an editor for your book, contact me for a quote.

Developmental Editing: This is the most in-depth type of editing and is helpful after you’ve finished a first draft. Developmental editing isn’t so much about finding typos, but more about ensuring the overall structure of your book is sound and also to identify any awkward sentences and phrases so authors can correct big-picture problems. Finding and correcting structural problems in your book will make your book much better. For nonfiction books, authors use the developmental edit as a guide for creating a final draft.

Copyediting: This type of editing takes place after development editing and before final proofreading. This type of editing focuses on finding problems with sentence structure, grammar, overused words, awkward phrases, improving transitions between sections and chapters, and overall improving the structure and flow of a final draft. This type of editing is comprehensive and allows authors to create a draft that is almost ready for layout.

Proofreading: This is the final type of editing, and takes place after copyediting and right before laying out the book. I don’t perform final proofreading books, I focus on the higher level editing, but there are many excellent proofreaders you can hire. If you are a prolific author, I also suggest looking into automated tools like ProWritingAid to help you find any lingering problems in your manuscript.